I) AMATEURS
“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin
Amateurs have nothing to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. They take chances, experiment, and follow their whims. Sometimes, in the process of doing things in an un professional way, they make new discoveries. Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public.
—-
II) HOW TO MOTIVATE LIFE
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.” Steve Jobs.
Consider this: One day you’ll be dead. Most of us prefer to ignore this most basic fact of life, but thinking about our inevitable end has a way of putting everything into perspective. When that gets into your mind, it utterly changed you… you’d think, ‘I’m not going to sit here and wait for things to happen, I’m going to make them happen, and if people think I’m an idiot I don’t care.”
—-
III) ACCUMULATE INTELLIGENCE
“If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.” Kenneth Goldsmith.
Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share.
—-
IV) TELL GOOD STORIES
Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.
Significant Objects, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker set out an experiment: They went out to thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales and bought a bunch of “insignificant” objects for an average of $1.25 an object. Then, they hired a bunch of writers, both famous and not-so-famous, to invent a story “that attributed significance” to each object. Finally, they listed each object on eBay, using the invented stories as the object’s description, and whatever they had originally paid for the object as the auction’s starting price. By the end of the experiment, they had sold $128.74 worth of trinkets for $3,612.51.
Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them.
Art forgery is a strange phenomenon. You might think that the pleasure you get from a painting depends on its color and its shape and its pattern; And if that’s right, it shouldn’t matter whether it’s an original or a forgery.
V) THE SELL
The most important part of a story is its structure. A good story structure is tidy, sturdy, and logical. Unfortunately, most of life is messy, uncertain, and illogical.
Every client presentation, every personal essay, every cover letter, every fund-raising request – they’re all pitches.